Ultrabook, tablet shipments to surge
Netbook, notebook to bear the cost
Market watcher DisplaySearch has forecast Ultrabook shipments of around 180m units in 2017 with a steep upward curve through previous years.
It hasn't entirely been turned by the Intel Kool Aid, mind. Notebook shipments as a whole will hit, it reckons, 426.6m units that year, so the Ultrabook category will have nabbed just 42.2 per cent of the laptop market.
Tablets will not prove to be a fad, racking up shipments of 380.7m units in 2017, according to DisplaySearch's figures, or 46.6 per cent of the overall mobile PC market.
Source: DisplaySearch
Compare that to 2011, when some 72.7m fondleslabs shipped, the researcher said, accounting for 25.5 per cent of the year's 285.4m mobile PC shipments. The tablet unit total is 256 per cent higher than 2010's figure; the overall mobile PC market was up 31 per cent on 2010.
Notebook shipments in 2011 are now expected to reach 187.5m units, DisplaySearch said, up 12 per cent year on year.
Source: DisplaySearch
Netbooks haven't taken the beating some observers thought the category might, with 2011 shipments set to hit 25.2m units, up 20 per cent year on year.
That said, it's clear from DisplaySearch's figures that netbook unit shipments will now fall each year through 2017, down to about 9m units that year. ®
COMMENTS
Ultrabooks - me arse!
If the current mediocre crop of ultrabooks is anything to go by the only surge I foresee is a surge in their discounting.
Netbooks
"Netbooks haven't taken the beating some observers thought the category might, with 2011 shipments set to hit 25.2m units, up 20 per cent year on year."
Might that be because they are so much cheaper than ithings?
Mine runs Linux Mint! and is waay more useful to me than a tablet
Two cables
One cable for thunderbolt and one for power. My docking station has no cables to connect to the laptop. I just place the laptop on the docking station and it docks.
However I don't think any of the current ultrabooks have any kind of docking provision so that's one more tick in the Air column.
If the air came with a proper keyboard with the Ctrl key in the right place and a hash key I'd buy one and just run windows on it.
5 years from now..
As if anyone has any idea whatsoever how the market will stand in 5 years. What a load of cobblers.
£800
....is a lot of cash to spend on a display just to not carry an extra power supply :p
